Tuesday, September 25, 2007

Update ~ ThrillerFest voting has been suspended!

Another ThrillerFest update.... The voting has been suspended. :( New Orleans was doing so well in the poll. Running neck & neck with San Francisco. It would have brought a much needed convention to the city. We will just have to see what the members of the Thriller Writers Association decide to do. Perhaps we can email to express our hope of them gathering in NOLA. I can not think of any city that fits the word "thriller" more than New Orleans!I'll let the post David Hewson put on their website describe what caused them to close the Thriller Fest voting.The Thrillerfest poll is now offlineWritten by David HewsonTuesday, 25 September 2007"Sorry folks but our poll on where Thrillerfest should be staged in 2009 has had to be taken offline after someone or something decided to try load the results by voting around the admittedly primitive measures we had in place against double voting. The figures you saw over the last few days, in which more than 300 votes appeared to be cast for one particular location, were, sadly, not a reflection of the general feelings on this matter.

Sorry about this but it is easier to take the thing offline rather than leave it open to abuse. This was very much an exercise to gauge opinion. There are many factors to take into account before a location for 2009, and the genuine feelings expressed in the poll - which we can gauge from the figures before it got attacked - are among them."

1 Comments:

New Orleans would have been a great place for the 2009 Thrillerfest to be held and it is too bad that the poll had to be taken down. The problem apparently was that someone was hacking the system to cast multiple votes (dozens at a time and in a couple of cases a hundred or more at a time) for New Orleans. The voting appeared to be legit for all of the other cities in the poll but as those other cities would gain votes gradually, New Orleans would jump by 50 or 100 votes almost instantly in reaction. Someone, probably in a well-intentioned effort to promote New Orleans for the convention, actually ended up harming New Orleans' chances by cheating. Too bad that individual tried to circumvent the system - New Orleans might have won anyway without the cheating.